Why do we have millions of tonnes of electronic waste, and what can we do about it?

By now it is no secret that we are trashing our planet. By trashing I mean buying so much stuff we don’t know what to do with them, so we throw them away. And by away, I mean landfill. Clothes, home decoration, kitchen stuff, and yes, electronic devices.

How much electronic waste is there?

In 2019, the world generated a striking 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste. That means 7.3 kg per person. 7.3 kg e-waste is like throwing away 40 smartphones, or 5 laptops or 3 blenders or 1 hoover.

Visualization of 7.3 kg of e-waste.

So just imagine every person in the world throwing out 40 smartphones, and you will have a realistic picture of electronic waste in a year. (Of course in reality the e-waste is not only smartphones, but it is also laptops, TVs, printers, cameras, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, just to mention a few examples.)

Types of e-waste, illustration from the UN E-waste monitor report

I would like to repeat: this is just in one year. And we will create this amount of e-waste next year. Except that it will be even more.

The total weight (excluding solar panels) of electronics consumed increases every year by 2.5 million tonnes globally. This means that e-waste is going to increase too, to 74.7 million tonnes by 2030 according to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor report.

All this electronic waste has serious environmental and human costs.

Before we can toss our electronics into the trash, they have to be produced. Electronics use rare metals and minerals that require ever more aggressive and destructive mining techniques, leaving areas devastated, polluted, broken, and stripped of biodiversity.

Devastation of rare earths mining (picture from here)

Mining is a toxic and dirty industry that not only threatens the health of miners but also puts nearby communities in danger. Water and air pollution is guaranteed in the mining areas leading to different diseases in the local communities or migration. On top of health hazards, miners are facing long hours, minimum salary, and inhumane treatment. And I should mention that miners are frequently children. In addition, rare mineral mining is usually located in developing countries such as Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa, where it can lead to armed conflict.

Rare minerals are not the only problem though. Manufacturing electronic devices is energy, water, and CO2 intensive. According to Greenpeace, three-quarters of the complete lifecycle CO2 emission of a phone happens during the manufacturing process and as the devices become more complex, they require more energy to produce. And there are also plastic and hazardous chemicals involved in the production. And let’s not forget about the working conditions in assembly factories that are not much better (if at all) than mining working conditions.

Even if this is not a detailed list of all the impacts, clearly electronics production is harmful in many aspects.

But at least all this exploitation, all the pollution, all the destruction is for a good cause, one could hope. Nope. But you saw that coming.

According to a Greenpeace report, 78% of smartphone sales is estimated to be attributed to existing smartphone consumers replacing their phones. In 2020, smartphone vendors sold around 1.38 billion smartphones worldwide, so if we make the calculations it means a little more than 1 billion phones were sold just because people wanted a new one. So all the exploitation, pollution, and destruction is for a cause: consumerism.

Why do we consume so much electronics?

In the take-make-dispose linear economic model that most electronic producers follow, income is from selling a product. The more they sell, the more they earn. So the goal is to sell as much as possible regardless of environmental and human costs. For that, companies have to convince consumers to consume. To buy new gadgets year after year. How can they do that? Here are some tricks used in the industry:

1. Launch new products every year that makes the previous models look and feel obsolete. We got to a point where the actual improvement in devices is marginal, but with clever marketing, companies can make it seem like that the new shape and the added one pixel in the camera will change lives. This is called perceived obsolescence.
2. Intentionally designing devices to break after a certain period (planned obsolescence), and making the repair difficult (for example with glued in batteries and proprietary screws).
3. Telecommunication companies offer plans that include switching devices every year. Do we need a phone every year? Absolutely not. But since it is part of the deal, why not? These types of deals are not only dangerous because they are incentivizing unnecessary consumption but also because they teach people the wrong values.
4. Intentionally designing low-quality, cheap products to encourage continuous consumption.
5. Stores and banks offer microloans and buy-now-pay-later services to make it easier for people to buy more.

Thanks to these practices, we think of electronic devices as disposable, readily available all the time, and affordable. We don’t think twice about buying a new phone, a TV, or a laptop, we buy because we can, not because we need.

The amount of e-waste is hard to imagine, so here is a tiny snippet of it.

And it is not only private individuals who like to get shiny new gadgets: companies constantly upgrade their equipment, buy new computers for new hires instead of using what they already have, order stuff in bulk and later realize that half of them are not even used.

The unnecessary, excessive consumption is already an enormous burden for the planet, but there is more coming. 5G will make us ditch our electronics even faster. Most of the current devices are incompatible with the faster speed of 5G, and this will lead to a mass upgrade in smartphones, routers, and other connected gadgets.

What a bummer it will be when corporations realize that those scientists were right, and there is a need for more renewable energy. How will we be able to build green tech when the majority of the necessary raw materials are already used in disposable electronic gadgets?

Easy, you would say, recycling.

Recycling of e-waste

Recycling would be a great idea indeed! According to a BBC article “One tonne of iPhones would deliver 300 times more gold than a tonne of gold ore and 6.5 times more silver than a tonne of silver ore.” What a deal, right? Nope! Apparently getting the minerals out from old phones is more difficult / less economical than destroying the planet and people’s lives to mine them.

In 2020 only 17% of all electronic waste got recycled. Why? Mostly because designers, aligning with the linear model, focus on making manufacturing easy but not a lot of thought is given to end-of-life handling. Products are difficult to disassemble or use hard to recycle materials, neither of which helps the case of recycling. Even if e-waste recycling is improving, it can not keep pace with overconsumption and the rapid disposal of devices. Thus the majority of our electronics end up in landfills, where they release toxic heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, or get incinerated where they release toxic compounds in the air.

On the bright side: we are getting disillusioned with tech “innovation”

The 2-year smartphone upgrade cycle seems to be broken, partly because of the 50% increase in handset price since 2016, partly because the hype around tech innovation in phones start to settle down and consumers start to realize that improvement between devices is marginal, and partly because fewer people are signing up for long term contracts that offer the predictable replacement cycles. The secondhand and refurbished market is growing, and there is Fairphone holding its stand against giant corporations.

What can we do to reduce electronic waste?

Private person:

• Use electronics as long as possible.
• Repair instead of buying new
• Buy second-hand.
• Refuse to buy cheap, throwaway stuff. Invest in long-lasting, quality products.
• Buy only what you need.
• Recycle — find a company that takes back your electronics to recover the minerals and metals.

Companies producing electronics:

• Find a sustainable business model. Can you turn your product into a long term service? Can you earn money on repairing instead of selling new?
• Produce quality products so customers don’t have to buy a new gadget every year.
• Design for modularity and easy repair.
• Offer repair service / spare parts to extend the device’s life span.
• Design for standards so your products are compatible with other devices, parts can easily be replaced, etc.
• Clean up your supply chain: only work with / buy from companies who don’t exploit their workers and pollute the environment.
• Use clean energy in the production.

Companies using electronics (so technically every single company):

• Limit your electronic purchase to what your employees need. Don’t buy a bunch of stuff just because you get e great business deal, or because it might be useful later.
• Re-use equipment! If someone leaves the company, their equipment is NOT poisonous! Other people still can use it! Don’t buy new stuff for every new hire!
• Dispose of the old devices responsibly!

Government:

• Introduce laws that oblige manufacturers to take back and take care of their own devices.
• Invest in more efficient electronics recycling programs.

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What do you think? What else can we do to reduce e-waste?

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